292	NORDIC BALLADS
how they herd the bulls and oxen,
how they herd the sorrel ponies;
and her trousseau—gloves and stockings
packed between white woollen blankets.
(Endzelin 36, Barons 4976.)
These poems are indeed interesting and tell us much concerning
the intellectual background of the 'dainos' and 'dainas'; but they
do not give their age. The Baltic peoples remained pagans officially
until the opening of the great Jagellonian period, and Chaucer's
£verray parfit gentle Knight' endeavoured, with blows, to change
their beliefs:
Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne
aboven alie naciouns in Pruce.
In Lettow hadde he reysed, and in Ruce,
no Cristen man so ofte of his degree.
Jagiello's politic conversion did not affect the mass of the people.
In the fields and forests the ancient deities still commanded belief
and affection, and as late as the seventeenth century a missionary
was informed that there were as many gods as places, persons, and
wants. The singing of 'dainos' was considered a heathen practice,
as that of 'laulud' in Esthonia, until as late as the middle of the
nineteenth century; and pious 'giesmes' circulated in opposition to
them, but with a sharp trench between. The epoch of universal
heathenism, then, reached to the late fourteenth century, and that
of popular heathenism almost to our own times; the pagan spirit
of the *dainos* and 'dainas' cannot be used in evidence for their
antiquity.
For the rest, the poems of the two small Baltic peoples, being
essentially lyrical, must be reduced to a small summary in a book
devoted to narrative verse. They are poems of ploughmen and
fishers, who have no history beyond the needs of the day and
season, and no delight in war and ambition. They speak of the
sorrows and devastation of wars, of the pain of parting, when the
conscript rides away saying 'Nevermore', to leave his body on the
field and a riderless horse as a token. Maidens are advised not to
follow the troops, since ploughmen make more constant husbands.
Better be a yokel than a trooper, or even a rich man, artisan, or
boyar. Then follow ballads of domestic occasions. Over and over
again we follow the round of falling in love, wooing, wedding,
marrying, crooning lullabies, dying. Toil quickly ages the peasant